Calm Down. Iran's Missiles Can't (and Won't) Hit the East Coast.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Israel is claiming that Iran is thisclose to developing a missile that can hit American soil. But missile and intelligence experts say Tehran has a long, technically complex road to travel before it can threaten Manhattan.

From getting all the rocket thrusters to work properly to developing heat shields that can withstand the stresses of rapid atmospheric reentry, Iran is probably many years away from getting an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The American spy apparatus, which once hyped the Iranian missile threat, has quietly stopping saying when Iran can hit the east coast. And the irony is that it’s taking Iran so long precisely because its missile efforts really are sophisticated.

“The bottom line,” says Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA Mideast analyst, “is that the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM.”

That, however, isn’t the message out of Jerusalem. Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told CNBC on Wednesday Iran was “two to three years” away from slamming a missile into New York, Boston or Washington. Its strategic-affairs minister, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, issued that same warning earlier this month, but declined to say when Iran’s mega-missile would be ready.

Chances are, the Israelis are hyping the Iranian missile threat so their American friends will consider the Iranian threat more acute. They’re not happy with Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for saying on Sunday that an Israeli attack on Iran was “not prudent.” But few missile or intelligence experts believe the new claim of an imminent Iranian ICBM is going to change Dempsey’s mind, or anyone else’s, because it’s far-fetched.

It’s true that Tehran has a robust missile program. Its stockpiles of Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, which top out at 800 miles, strike fear into the hearts of Arab Gulf states. Israel has real reason to fear the development of its Sejjil medium-range ballistic missile, a more sophisticated weapon, that could maybe reach Israel in a few years. And unlike rogue-state missile flameouts like North Korea, Iran is able to launch satellites into space, which is a key ICBM step (since any intercontinental missile is going to have to fly through space in order to attack a foe so far away).

But none of that adds up to Iran getting a missile that can travel the 6,000 miles necessary for striking America any time soon.

For one thing, Iran needs to master what’s called “clustering” of the engines needed to power its missile. Picture a box with an engine — probably from a North Korean Nodong-2, the paterfamilias of Iran’s missiles — on each corner. Iran in fact unveiled precisely such a design in 2010.

There’s a long way between design and a working set of thrusters, however. Basically, in order to keep the missile on track as it streaks through the heavens, each engine has to provide precisely the same amount of thrust. If not, the pulses of acoustic energy from one engine might destroy another. “That’s not an easy thing, to make sure they fire simultaneously and don’t shake themselves to death in process,” says Greg Thielmann, a former missile analyst at the State Department’s intelligence wing.

Then there are additional technical obstacles Iran isn’t believed to have overcome. Guidance systems need to be able to withstand the pressures of atmospheric reentry to keep the missile on course. “Then the warhead itself has to function at such extreme physical conditions,” says Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear studies program at the Federation of American Scientists. “There are several really complicated steps they have to go through to do this.”

As well as mundane ones. Iran will have to balance durability and weight, most likely leading it to want aluminum alloys for any early long-range missile rather than heavy steel, says David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Tehran may not have the aluminum stocks for it. It may not even have the machine tools necessary for boring out an ICBM’s diameter. And ICBMs are big, meaning if they stay in one place for too long, they’ll be vulnerable to detection — and an Israeli or American bombing campaign. That’s why Wright thinks they’ll have to be rugged enough to survive being moved along the roads, which can also create convoys ripe for the schwacking.

Even Iran’s seriousness about its missiles is a potential time-suck. Unlike North Korea, which rushes to claim military glory even when its missile tests fail, Iran tends to test its missile stockpile thoroughly. Long-range missiles tests will likely mean Iranian ships heading out into the Indian Ocean to collect data and telemetry. Which are also vulnerable to detection, giving the U.S. and Israel some early warning.

“You’re gonna know whether this happens. You’re gonna see at least one flight test of this bigger stage,” Wright says. “We haven’t seen them develop reentry vehicles on something this long-range.”

Bottom line? Iran is probably “five to ten years away” from an ICBM, Wright thinks. That seems plausible to other experts interviewed for this story, though most demurred from making an actual prediction.

That’s similar to what U.S. spy agencies used to estimate. Emphasis on the used to.

In 1993, the CIA told Congress Iran was “10 to 15 years” away from an ICBM. An assessment of the missile threat in 1995 drawn from across the 16 intelligence agencies, called a National Intelligence Estimate, pegged the date for doomsday at 2010.

That actually caused a freakout from Republicans in Congress, who accused the CIA of understating the urgency of the Iranian missile threat to help the Clinton administration stall on missile defense. They in turn asked Donald Rumsfeld to chair a commission on ballistic missiles. Rumsfeld’s conclusion, in 1998, was that it would take Iran at most five years to build a long-range missile; and he warned the Iranians may have already decided to do so.

All of those estimates were ultimately proven to be unrealistic. The Iranians didn’t have an ICBM in 2003, they didn’t have one in 2010, and they don’t have one now.

Lately, the spy agencies have sung a different tune. When James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, briefed Congress on the Iranian missile threat this month, he notably declined to predict when Iran would get an ICBM. Same with his predecessor, Dennis Blair.

“That’s probably a tacit acknowledgement that they really don’t have much to say,” says Pillar, who was the top Mideast analyst for the entire constellation of intelligence agencies during much of the last decade. “It’s far enough away to say ‘they’re so many years away,’ or you don’t say anything at all.”

Israel has lots of reasonable fears about Iran, a country whose president denies the Holocaust while implying that he’d love a second one, and which appears to be building a nuclear weapon. It doesn’t have to make all kinds of extra concerns up.

Additional research assistance provided by Robert Beckhusen.

Spencer Ackerman is Danger Room's senior reporter, based out of Washington, D.C., covering weapons of doom and the strategies they're used to implement.
Follow @attackerman and @dangerroom on Twitter.

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The New French Hacker-Artist Underground

A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris,
secretly refurbishing the city's neglected treasures.
Photo: UX

Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small café near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.

But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Ségur and walked home as the sun rose. The mission had been so easy that one of the youths, Natacha, seriously asked herself if she had dreamed it. No, she concluded: “In a dream, it would have been more complicated.”

This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.

What has made much of this work possible is UX’s mastery, established 30 years ago and refined since, of the city’s network of underground passageways—hundreds of miles of interconnected telecom, electricity, and water tunnels, sewers, catacombs, subways, and centuries-old quarries. Like computer hackers who crack digital networks and surreptitiously take control of key machines, members of UX carry out clandestine missions throughout Paris’ supposedly secure underground tunnels and rooms. The group routinely uses the tunnels to access restoration sites and stage film festivals, for example, in the disused basements of government buildings.

UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

Eight years ago, the French government didn’t know UX existed. When their exploits first trickled out into the press, the group’s members were deemed by some to be dangerous outlaws, thieves, even potential inspiration for terrorists. Still, a few officials can’t conceal their admiration. Mention UX to Sylvie Gautron of the Paris police—her specialty is monitoring the city’s old quarries—and she breaks into a wide smile. In an era when ubiquitous GPS and microprecise mapping threaten to squeeze all the mystery from our great world cities, UX seems to know, and indeed to own, a whole other, deeper, hidden layer of Paris. It claims the entire city, above- and belowground, as its canvas; its members say they can access every last government building, every narrow telecom tunnel. Does Gautron believe this? “It’s possible,” she says. “Everything they do is very intense.”

It is not at all hard to steal a Picasso, Lazar Kunstmann tells me. One of UX’s early members and the group’s unofficial spokesman, Kunstmann—the name is almost certainly a pseudonym, given its superhero-like German meaning, “Art-man”—is fortyish, bald, black-clad, warm, and witty. We’re sitting in the back room of a student café, downing espressos and discussing the spectacular theft in May 2010 of 100 million euros’ worth of paintings from the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. He disputes the contention of a police spokesperson that this was a sophisticated operation. According to an article published in Le Monde, a solitary individual unscrewed a window frame at 3:50 am, cut a padlock from a gate, and strode through the galleries lifting one work each by Léger, Braque, Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso. “The thief was perfectly informed,” the officer told the newspaper. If he hadn’t known the window had a vibration detector, he would’ve just broken it. If he hadn’t known the alarm and part of the security system were broken, he wouldn’t have wandered throughout the museum. If he hadn’t known the schedule of night rounds, he wouldn’t have arrived in the middle of the longest quiet period.

Impressive, right? No, Kunstmann says. “He ascertained that nothing was working,” Kunstmann sighs, knowing full well the shoddy security of the museum in question. “The exterior is full of graffiti artists, the homeless, and crack smokers,” he goes on. This would have made it easy for the thief to blend in and surreptitiously watch the windows all night, observing how the guards circulated.

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U.S. health officials say new flu virus found in bats

A new strain of influenza A has been found in fruit bats, indicating for the first time that bats, like birds, can be carriers of the virus, though it is not believed risky to humans, according to US health authorities.

"This is the first time an influenza virus has been identified in bats, but in its current form the virus is not a human health issue," said Suxiang Tong, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's pathogen discovery program.

"The study is important because the research has identified a new animal species that may act as a source of flu viruses."

The influenza A virus was detected in a sample of three of 316 live little yellow-shouldered bats captured at two different sites in Guatemala.

That type of bat is not known to bite humans but feeds on fruit, and is native to Central and South America.

Previous flu pandemics, such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which came to the public's attention as "swine flu," have been known to originate in animals and eventually transform so that they gain the ability to infect people.

"Fortunately, initial laboratory testing suggests the new virus would need to undergo significant changes to become capable of infecting and spreading easily among humans," said Ruben Donis, chief of the Molecular Virology and Vaccines Branch in CDC's Influenza Division.

"A different animal -- such as a pig, horse or dog -- would need to be capable of being infected with both this new bat influenza virus and human influenza viruses for reassortment to occur."

More details about the findings are published in the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Wii games don't mean kids exercise more: study

(Reuters) - Virtual boxing, tennis and dancing along with video game systems may not be helping children meet daily exercise requirements, according to a U.S. study.

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas found that children who were given so-called active video games to play on a Nintendo Wii didn't end up logging any more moderate or vigorous physical activity than those given games they could play sitting on the couch.

Some public health researchers have hoped that active video games might be an alternative to outdoor play and sports for at least some of the physical activity children need, especially for those who live in unsafe neighborhoods where playing outside isn't always an option.

"We expected that playing the video games would in fact lead to a substantial increase in physical activity in the children," said Tom Baranowski and colleagues at Baylor.

"Frankly, we were shocked by the complete lack of difference."

For the study, they passed out Wii consoles to 78 children who didn't already have one. Half were given their choice of an active game, such as Wii Sports or Dance Dance Revolution-Hottest Party 3, and the other half their choice of inactive game, such as Disney Sing-It Pop Hits or Super Mario Galaxy.

Halfway through the study, which was published in Pediatrics, the children -- all 9 to 12-years-old and above average weight -- got their choice of a second game from the same category as their first.

Baranowski and his colleagues tracked the children for 13 weeks, testing their physical activity levels with a motion-measuring device called an accelerometer.

Participants wore the devices on a belt during four different week-long periods throughout the study, which allowed the research team to determine when they were sedentary, lightly exercising, or engaged in moderate-to-vigorous exercise.

Accelerometer logs showed that throughout the study period, children with the active games didn't get any more exercise than those given inactive video games.

At weeks one, six, seven and 12, children in the active game group got an average of 25 to 28 minutes of moderate or vigorous physical activity each day, compared to between 26 and 29 minutes for those in the inactive video game group.

There was also no difference in the time spent doing light physical activity or being sedentary during any week the researchers monitored.

Baranowski said his team couldn't tell if children just didn't exert much energy playing the active games, or if they compensated for exercise they got playing Wii with less exercise at other points in the day.

Nintendo was not available for comment and other researchers said that while the games were no substitute for the real thing, they might be better than no exercise at all.

It's possible that children playing active Wii games burned a few extra calories that the movement device didn't pick up on -- for instance, if they were moving their arms a lot in a boxing game, said Jacob Barkley, an exercise scientist from Kent State University in Ohio who didn't take part in the study.

"Maybe the Wii isn't going to increase physical activity a whole heck of a lot," Barkley told Reuters Health.

"But it might increase caloric expenditure a bit more than a traditional sedentary video game, and if you do that on a daily basis that could have a cumulative effect that might be beneficial."

(Editing by Elaine Lies and Bob Tourtellotte)

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Tar Pit Tour: The Ice Age Miracle From Miracle Mile

LOS ANGELES – Twenty thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, an enormous mammoth with a bad back, a misshapen tusk and a weird lump on his jaw wandered into a tar pit on what is now the Miracle Mile shopping district.

It was one of those Darwinian twists of fate, an ignoble end to a noble animal that led a hard life and died before his time. But even as that old rogue bull struggled against his inevitable end, all around him life went on. Saber-tooth cats and dire wolves hunted. Bison and camel grazed. Birds of every description flew overhead.

All of this unfolded exactly where Trevor Valle works at the George C. Page Museum. He knows this because he’s helping sort through one of the largest known caches of bones from the last ice age, meticulously cataloging animals that once roamed the very spot where he sits each day.

“Right where my desk is, there could have been a throwdown between dire wolves and a sloth,” says Valle, who so loves the Page that he had its logo tattooed on his arm even before he worked there. He smiles, then adds, “My job is so rad.”

For more than a century, scientists have been excavating fossils from the La Brea tar pits and cataloging them at the Page Museum. It's a paleontological treasure chest, a snapshot of the late Pleistocene and Ice Age California.

That picture is growing sharper by the day as a team of paleontologists digs ever deeper into Project 23, a huge cache uncovered almost six years ago during the excavation of what would become a parking garage.

Above: The Rancho La Brea tar pits are composed of heavy oil fractions called asphaltum. Even today, crude oil still seeps up through the Sixth Street Fault to the surface, forming large pools within Hancock Park. It looks like melted chocolate and smells like hot asphalt.

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Taliban Suicide Attacks Have Held Steady for Most of the War

U.S. military doctors at Bagram Air Field treat a boy wounded by a suicide bomber, 2007. Photo: U.S. Air Force

Since the Taliban became an insurgent movement to oust the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, it’s found a steady stream of recruits to blow themselves up in the hopes of killing others. A review of official NATO statistics finds that whatever tactics the U.S. and its allies have thrown at it throughout the course of the war, Taliban suicide attacks have largely remained constant, averaging about one every three days. And since the surge, those attacks have grown more deadly.

A study compiled by the Army (.PDF) for the U.S.-led NATO command in Afghanistan looked at suicide attacks throughout most of the war. The Taliban launched 119 suicide attacks in 2006, when there were about 30,000 U.S. troops fighting a newly resurgent guerrilla and terrorist force. By 2010, when U.S. forces peaked at roughly 100,000, there were 106 suicide attacks.

That was the same number of suicide attacks as in 2009, when U.S. focus returned to Afghanistan. During two of the Taliban’s peak years of resurgence, 2007 and 2008, the Taliban launched 132 and 116 attacks, respectively.

The methods of suicide bombing have remained relatively constant as well. For the five years the study focused on — the insurgency picked up force around 2005 — the Taliban split about evenly between strapping bombs to a person’s body and sending someone to drive a car packed with explosives. The split was literally even in 106, with 53 attacks of either kind. The greatest variance came in 2009, when car bombs outpaced body bombs, 59 to 47.

Determining the number of suicide attacks in 2011, a year the study doesn’t include, wasn’t possible. A spokeswoman for the NATO command, Australian Lt. L.M. Rago, told Danger Room, “It has been determined we can’t provide you with the level of detail you have requested.” But the United Nations reported in February that the number of suicide attacks last year “did not increase over 2010.”

That said, those attacks grew much deadlier for Afghans. The U.N. also reported that suicide bombings killed 431 civilians, an 80 percent increase from 2010.

The Army study was more concerned with their effect on NATO troops. And there, it found, those effects were marginal. “More than 3 suicide bombers are required to inflict a single casualty on the international forces,” it concluded.

And suicide bombing is hardly the insurgent tactic of choice. That would be the homemade bomb — which are on the upswing, despite the Obama administration’s troop surge.

But over the last year, the United Nations found, suicide bombing has grown “more complex, sometimes involving multiple suicide bombers, and designed to yield greater numbers of dead and injured civilians.”

The NATO command recently argued that the deadlier bomb attacks are a marker of progress. The “freedom of action [insurgents] show today is increasingly in [homemade bombs and suicide bombing," Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the day-to-day commander of the war, told Pentagon reporters earlier this month. "They don't have the capability to take us on directly." The troop surge, he said, has "pushed them into a certain [set of tactics] which isn’t ideal.”

Perhaps, but after ten years of war, Scaparrotti’s predecessors and colleagues have yet to figure out how to erode the Taliban’s ability to convince young men to kill people and die trying.

Spencer Ackerman is Danger Room's senior reporter, based out of Washington, D.C., covering weapons of doom and the strategies they're used to implement.
Follow @attackerman and @dangerroom on Twitter.

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Michael Douglas films anti-insider trading video for FBI

Actor Michael Douglas has filmed a new public service announcement for the FBI that plays on his character Gordon Gekko from the film "Wall Street."

In 1987, Douglas won an Oscar for his portrayal of the fictional Gekko. Douglas and writer-director Oliver Stone constructed the villainous Gekko character as a cautionary tale of the excesses of corporate greed. But in the quarter century since the film's release, Gekko's infamous "greed is good" speech has become a rallying cry of many working on Wall Street.

But now, Douglas is playing on the character's fame to warn about the dangers of insider trading. The PSA begins with a clip from "Wall Street" before transitioning to a present-day Douglas, who says:

"Hello, I'm Michael Douglas. In the movie 'Wall Street,' I played Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings.

"The movie was fiction, but the problem is real. Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and the integrity of the financial markets. If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is."

FBI Special Agent David Chaves tells Bloomberg News that Douglas wanted to do something to help combat what he sees as a misguided culture on Wall Street. Chaves says Douglas told him people working on Wall Street often approach him, offering a "high-five" for his portrayal of Gekko.

"We thought one of the most revered actors of our time would be a great voice for combating crime on Wall Street," Chaves said.

An often-overlooked fact from "Wall Street" is that the Gekko character never says the phrase, "greed is good." While passionately arguing for a business structure in which corporations are operated by the actual shareholders who have a direct stake in the company, Gekko declares, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."

This is also not the first time Douglas has revisited the Gekko character. In 2010, Douglas and Stone reunited for a "Wall Street" sequel. While critics praised Douglas' performance (he was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actor), the film was largely considered a critical and commercial disappointment.

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